“What’s more crazy is that God loves those children as much as their abductor,” he pointed his noodle-wrapped fork at the screen. “Even in my pastoral days, the Father’s love was always the hardest concept for me to grasp.”
“I’m pretty sure the abductor’s going to hell,” Rachel replied.
“No one is beyond redemption. All they need to do is repent, change their ways, and follow the Lord.”
Rachel didn’t know what to say to that. Could a man as evil as Father find salvation? It would take a Christmas miracle.
She wondered what the abductor would do now that Rachel had liberated his “children.” Something stupid, Rachel hoped, but not so stupid that it ended the lives of the rest of his prisoners. Rachel closed her eyes. Only a higher power would know what fate had in store for those children.
“How do you do it, Rachel? Look at these images daily?”
It was a harder question to answer than Rachel thought it would be. In her early twenties and thirties, she made her living selling sketches of dead people. Gore had never been a stranger to her, but she couldn’t match the fixation to any particular event. She knew it had to be linked to the Gift. But how did she deal with it so often? “It’s… I try to look past the horror and at the person. Who they are on the inside. Focus on that instead of whatever their current state may be.”
“Takes a lot of guts. I don’t think I could do it. Actually, I know I can’t,” Liam admitted.
Not one to brag, Rachel didn’t find any reason to boast about her hardships, though there was something empowering about overcoming fear and facing down a horrific Orphan. “There’s a lot of evil there. I’ll never stop it, but I can help those in my little sphere of the world. Or at least try.”
Liam put his hand on hers. His eyes watered. “You’re very brave, Rachel.”
“Detective Peak says there is a fine line between bravery and stupidity.”
Liam smiled softly at his daughter. “If that’s the case, I’m proud of the fool you’ve become.”
His kind expression shifted to disgust when he saw the image on the screen. It showed Number Four’s bare back and the crude, ten-year-old scar. “It looks like a football jersey, Lord help us,” he mumbled.
Rachel pulled her hand out from under her father’s. “That’s it.”
“What?”
“Me grasping at straws.” Rachel stood from her seat. “Thanks for lunch.”
“Rachel, I don’t understand.”
“Love you, Dad,” Rachel gave him a quick hug and rushed out of the restaurant.
Rachel dialed Peak as she sped through Highlands’ streets that rose and dipped with the mountain’s terrain. Sidewalk lights, mom-and-pop restaurants, and stores with authentic Appalachian antiques blurred as Rachel sped to the police station.
“Yep.” Peak answered the phone.
“Eleven children, numbers carved like those on jerseys, and a lodge full of football paraphernalia. What kind of person do you think we’re dealing with?”
“You know how I feel about rhetorical questions.”
“Start researching disgraced football coaches/players. I’m on my way over.”
“This is a long shot.”
“What else do we have?”
“More rhetorical questions, it seems.”
Rachel arrived at the station. Rachel rolled up her chair next to Peak’s desk.
“Highlands doesn’t have a football team,” Peak said. He would know, having gone to Highlands’ only school.
“We branch out then,” Rachel said. “Yogi Taft was his first victim, meaning something prompted this man to begin his kidnapping spree. We find what that is, we find our man.”
“He could just be a nutcase with no cause or motive.”
“Perhaps,” Rachel said. She felt Yogi’s presence behind her. She could smell his sweat.
“Is he a coach?” she whispered
The Orphan grabbed Rachel’s left shoulder and squeezed. His fingernails burrowed into her flesh, but Rachel knew it really couldn’t hurt her.
Peak eyed her and then looked to where he thought Yogi was standing. “Visitor?”
“Look into coaches for all the local schools from pre-1992.”
Peak started typing away. Rachel watched anxiously.
“No great tragedies to be found,” Peak said as he scrolled through old news articles. “It’s all random, Harroway.”
“The owner of the truck was a traveling salesman from Ohio. Check there.”
“Travelling is the key word. He could’ve been killed anywhere.”
Annoyed by his cynicism, Rachel barked, “Look it up anyway.”
Peak’s shoulders went slack as he scrolled his research through the lists of links.
“Try that one,”
Peak pulled up the article titled ‘Local Coach Fired For Relations With A Cheerleader.’
Rachel glanced up at Yogi. He didn’t respond.
“Okay, how about that one.”
Peak brought up the picture of the coach. Yogi stayed motionless.
“What are we looking for?”
“For a response from our friend,” Rachel said.
“Ah,” Peak replied and started going through the articles as fast as possible. He scrolled through pictures from old “busted” papers, too.
Yogi didn’t move. Not until Peak pulled up the picture of Kirk Heineken.
Number One howled and started running back and forth in the precinct.
8
Father
Rachel commanded Peak to stop scrolling.
“That’s the one,” She tapped her finger on the computer screen.
Peak pulled up the article.
The accident happened in 1988.
Thirty-three-year-old Kirk Heineken, coach to the Blaine Hill High School football team from Ohio, crashed the team travel bus on the way to a ski resort. It was intended to be a reward for the top eleven players. Every one of them died but Kirk, who suffered major brain damage, so said the first article.
Peak went to the next one. It was in regards to Kirk’s mandatory resignation as coach. Though normally a peaceable man, Kirk attacked the school board after they made the announcement. Surprisingly, they didn’t press charges, and there hadn’t been news about him since.
The twenty-year-old picture showed Kirk at thirty-three with short brown hair, a wide lower jaw, tiny eyes, and a husky physique. He didn’t look like a monster, but by the way Yogi screamed, he might as well have been the devil.
Peak looked up Kirk in the database. He had a few traffic violations, but nothing major. The picture showed his most recent driver’s license. Kirk had a goatee with a gray bottom. His brown hair had receded, giving him a big forehead. His cheeks drooped. His eye looked like hollow brown shells that revealed nothing about the man.
The address on the license linked him to Sylva, NC, a town an hour from Highlands.
Rachel and Peak went on a field trip and pulled to a stop in front of the single-story home with wooden slats for walls and a rusty muscle car rotting in the driveway. It sat on a curving road with a few other homes that were similarly lower middle class. With his pistol loaded with the bullets Rachel gave him for Christmas, Peak gave the door a hearty knock.
A local law enforcement officer arrived with the warrant. “You know what I had to do to convince the court for this?”
“You know the promotion you’re going to get if this is our guy?”
Grumbling, the mountain-blooded cop gestured for them to step aside and slammed his foot into the door. The house was sparsely decorated. Dust drifted through the air. Old football trophies sat on the fireplace mantelpiece. Framed photographs of Blaine Hill’s deceased football players hung on the walls. By the dusty look of everything and the stale dry air, no one had touched this place for weeks. The refrigerator was empty. The freezer had a few uncooked hamburger patties. There were football playbooks and sports history books on the shelf. The bedroom consisted of a bed, dre
sser, and walk-in closet. Nothing that pointed to this man being a killer. Then again, most killers didn’t look like killers.
Peak found important documentation in the file box tucked in the back of the closet. They sifted through crinkled gas and restaurant receipts, a Social Security Number, birth certificate, work contract for a local trucking company, and property papers for a familiar lodge.
“Told you,” Rachel said as she withdrew the sales document for Father’s Highlands lodge. He owned it long before Number One was taken.
“Sorry for doubting your Orphan,” Peak said dryly.
They reported the find to McConnell and had an APB out within the hour. Rachel reached out to the trucking company and got on the phone with Kirk’s boss, a man with a Southern twang.
“We send our trucks nationwide. Kirk is one of our better drivers.”
“You specialize in eighteen wheelers, right?”
“Yes, ma’am. We deliver for grocery stores, mostly.”
“Where is Kirk now?”
“He’s currently on vacation. Most years, he saves his vacation days for winter and takes two weeks off. It’s hard to believe he was involved with the poor kids on the news.”
“It’s always who you least expect. Is there anything else you can tell me about Kirk?”
“Keeps to himself. Loves football. Hunts. Goes to the gun range every week. Just a good ol’ boy.”
“Do you know if he owned any other properties?”
“Can’t say. He’s one of my highest paid employees, but I don’t know where he spends the money. We’ve been working together for nearly two decades. The man is a closed book.”
Rachel told him to contact her or Peak if anything happened. She hung up and turned to talk to Peak when her phone rang.
“This is Dispatch. We have a 10-67.”
Peak got the same call a moment later.
Rachel drove them back to Highlands as quick as the car would take them. They rolled down a single-lane street until they came to a stop beside the multiple squad cars surrounding a cadaver. Exchanging looks, Rachel and Peak exited Rachel’s Impala and, with hurried feet, headed for the body. The wind took Rachel’s hair and chilled her ears.
“Took you long enough,” Gates said.
Like a crash dummy, the body lay limply in the snowy ditch. The woman’s arms and legs bent the same uncanny way all bodies do. She wore earmuffs and a puffy blue snow jacket with pants to match. Age lines, veins, and crow’s feet hinted that she was between forty and fifty years old. Dried blood that looked like black ooze painted her front and .44 caliber bullet holes peppered her torso. The fuzzy insulation puffed-out jacket was embedded with little asphalt rocks. The skin on her cheek was peeling back from falling on the road at a high speed.
“The gunshot wounds killed her. Obviously. The killer dumped her here. From the vehicle by the looks of it,” the coroner said.
“Any identification?” Peak asked.
The officers shook their head. “Nada.”
“An anonymous tipper called it in,” another said.
“What are you thinking?” Rachel asked Peak.
“Could be Kirk. Could be a completely unconnected carjacking. By the time we find out, our perpetrator could’ve skipped town. That, or he might clean house.”
“You mean kill his captives?” Rachel asked.
“What would you do if the world is pressing down on you, and there’s nowhere to run?”
“Fight to the very end,” Rachel replied.
Peak smiled. “Not everyone is like you, Harroway.”
Rachel glanced around the mountainous roads going higher up the mountain. She ran her hand up her scalp. She needed to find this woman’s Orphan.
“I’m going on a walk,” Rachel said and started into the woods. Peak watched her curiously and then knelt next to the body.
Lonely snow flurries danced in the air and between the trees. The way the trees faded into the distance gave the place a fantastical appearance. The blizzard would hit Highlands pretty hard tonight and again on New Year's Eve. That was the least of Rachel’s concerns at the moment. She crunched icy snow underfoot and pressed through the labyrinth of white-capped trees. Using the necks of scrawny trees or exposed roots, Rachel followed the Sense farther into the winter wonderland. Within a few moments, the police chatter faded into nothingness. Leafless trees waved at her with their long fingers and shimmied in the infrequent gusts of wind.
Past a felled tree and its dead tree trunk with a crown of wooden spikes, footprints appeared in the snow. They were female, size six boots. They went deeper into the wilds of the mountain and through a thicket of bushes. Turning sideways and keeping her arms up, Rachel shimmied through the snow-cloaked shrubs and into a grove of evergreen trees. At the center was a shredded rabbit that was frozen stiff. Its blood oozed from its furry body like it was fresh. Its leg twitched. Rachel felt her insides churn as crimson bloomed from under the hare in the shape of a rose. The Orphan here was powerful.
A prickly sensation exploded over the back of her head, arms, legs, and torso like every limb had fallen asleep at the same time.
Rachel didn’t need to look behind her. She knew the woman was there, even if the woman didn’t cast a shadow. Watching her own breath mist, Rachel twisted around.
No one.
With a grip as cold and cruel as an iron clamp, the woman turned Rachel around.
The skin on the woman’s lightly wrinkled cheek peeled back and revealed teeth and red, veiny gums. It was a reminder of the woman’s fall from a moving vehicle and her kiss with the coarse asphalt road. Blood oozed from the massive entrance wounds across her torso. A little trickled from the corner of her lip.
“Just the woman I was looking for,” Rachel said as she tried to pull free of the woman’s unbreakable grip.
“Why?” the woman mumbled, tears trickling down her disfigured face. Her fingernails pierced Rachel’s flesh.
“I don’t know,” Rachel said, sensing the Orphan becoming more and more violent. She’s confused. Scared. Be patient with her, Rachel.
The woman grabbed Rachel’s other arm and slammed Rachel against the tree. Rachel gasped as the bark smashed into her spine.
“Why! Why! WHY!” the woman screamed with untamed anger. She lifted Rachel a few inches off the ground and smashed her into the tree again and again and again. Each hit sent a spike of pain thundering through Rachel’s being. The back of her head thumped against the bark and Rachel felt a warmth trickle through her hair and down the nape of her neck.
It’s not real. She can’t really hurt you, Rachel told herself as the woman screamed “Why!” a dozen more times.
The world around Rachel swirled and blackened. She fought against the woman’s grip but couldn’t break it. She clenched her eyes as tight as she could as her head slammed into the tree again. Go away, Rachel commanded. The Orphan went to slam Rachel’s head a final time.
Suddenly, Rachel felt the woman let go. She collapsed forward, landing in a crouch. The snow gobbled her palms and knees. She opened her eyes to the serene evergreen grove around her. Lonely snowflakes kept drifting in the misty air. The Orphan had vanished.
With a shaking hand, Rachel touched the back of her head, winced, and brought her crimson-stained fingers into view.
Her face hit the snow, and the world faded into blackness.
Crying.
Cold bit Rachel’s face.
She awoke, one cheek in the buried snow and the other wet from melted snowflakes. Teeth chattering, Rachel pushed herself out of the snow. The pain in the back of her head had vanished along with the blood on her fingers. Nonetheless, the frigid weather made her joints scream and numbed her face.
With her back turned to Rachel and knees held against her chest, the woman wearing earmuffs sat next to the dead rabbit. Shadows from the evergreen trees fell ever her like black bars. Her weeping filled the grove like a sad song.
Unsure if she was motivated by bravery or foolishness,
Rachel steadied herself and started toward the woman. As soon as the woman heard snow crunch under Rachel’s boot, she stopped her weeping and began to rise.
Rachel planted her feet and held her hands in her jacket pockets. As much as she was tempted to draw a pistol, natural weapons did nothing to Orphans. Rachel’s only defense against the dead was her determined spirit.
The woman twisted back to Rachel. A shadow fell upon her skinned cheek. Tears rolled down the other.
“Do you want to talk or fight?” Rachel said.
“Why?” the woman asked more out of dread than anger.
“Maybe it was God’s will or the man’s fault. Maybe there’s no reason for any of it. One thing is certain, you’re dead.”
The woman took a step forward, the shadow leaving her disfigured face. “My family?”
Rachel kept her eyes from watering. “Were they with you when it happened?”
The woman slowly shook her head. The peeled skin on her cheek flapped at the motion.
“Then they’re not my concern,” Rachel said bluntly. “My name is Rachel. What’s yours?”
“Clairease,” the woman said as if she was recalling it. “Clairease Kettlebach.”
“Alright, Clairease. This world is not your home anymore.”
“Then… where?”
Rachel shrugged. Even after all these years, it was still a hard question. “Somewhere beyond.”
“Heaven?” Clairease asked like a lost child.
Perhaps not after you smashed my head in. “Maybe,” Rachel said. “You won’t know until you go there, and you can’t go until you’re avenged.”
“How?” the woman begged, taking another step forward. “How?”
“When your killer is brought to justice. I can’t do that unless you help me. Tell me how he did it.”
Horror sank the woman’s face. “Hitchhiker. Kind man. Broken-down car, he said. I drove. He shot me. Tossed me outside.”
Rachel pondered it for a moment. “What kind of car do you own?”
Clairease gave her a confused expression. “Chrysler Sebring.”
“Perfect. That’s all I needed, Clairease,” Rachel said and hurried out of the grove.
The Lost Orphans Omnibus: A Riveting Mystery Page 9